Absence

Following Shakespeare's command to "Give sorrow words" that introduces Absence, Nancy Manning establishes the overall theme of multiple kinds of loss. Objects like her Noni's cuckoo clock and her father's black-and-red check jacket she saved from the rag bag have great power. Manning shows compassion for students who have "tattooed my heart," for nine-year-old Pawana sold into marriage, and for victims of war-torn Ukraine. The deaths of her friend Beth and Beth's brother, Larry, whose death "strangled like a cord," hang like a weight on Manning's heart. To persevere she imagines flying away with a dragonfly to "escape the earthly load of life," and she describes how a lone white iris in a Van Gogh painting "defies being picked or forgotten." Utilizing an abundance of sensual detail, Manning knows what is preserved will not be forgotten, even while she fails to find a way, so "death would never haunt me." Absence is infused with a hard-won understanding of what it means to be human because Manning has cored it from the heart.

-Vivian Shipley, author, Slow Dancing with the Dark and Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Emeritus



Absence haunts every page of this chapbook where we encounter "loss after loss after loss." We want to turn away but are compelled to look. Manning's beautiful imagery draws us in, as she describes a cemetery where "gray marble shapes / call out names in a dull monotone." At the heart of this moving collection is the poem "Your Absence," that focuses on the speaker's daughter's move to college, which has resulted in "the tidal wave of jewelry, powders...oboe and guitars" being replaced with a silence that can only be filled by imagining the daughter's return, and by extension, poetry. Hope slowly approaches in the form of a "lone mallard [that] paddles to my dock, reminds me summer isn't far away."

-Nancy Naomi Carlson, author, Piano in the Dark